Kawaji
Sub FM · London—Portland, ME
I spent years playing upright bass before I ever touched a turntable. What stayed with me from that instrument wasn't technique — it was the understanding that low frequencies are physical before they're musical. You feel them in your sternum. They rearrange the room.
Kawaji is a selector, producer, and radio host based in Portland, Maine, working at the intersection of deep dubstep, dub techno, future garage, 140, and drum & bass. His biweekly show on Sub FM, a London-based underground bass music station, explores music that lives in the tension between hypnotic minimalism and weighted low-end, tracks that reward patience and trust the sub-bass to do emotional work.
Before he was a DJ, he was an upright bass player, performing jazz in small groups and big bands across southern Maine. That background gave him something more useful than repertoire: an understanding that low frequencies are physical before they're musical, and that the best bass music speaks to the body before the conscious mind has caught up.
His path to electronic music was indirect. He moved from Boston, MA to South Sudan to build a network of community radio stations and training local journalists. This removed him from Western club culture during a period when dubstep and its offshoots were evolving rapidly. Listening through unreliable connections and sharing tracks on USB thumb drives, stripped of scene context, he developed an idiosyncratic relationship with the music that has shaped his approach ever since: less concerned with trends, more attuned to what feels structurally and emotionally honest.
Now back in the US, Kawaji DJs events ranging from gallery openings to club nights, produces original music, and helped develop the Sirsinate record label. His work behind decks or in front of a DAW is organized around the animating idea that the most compelling music operates in the spaces between established categories, and that bass is the element capable of bridging them.